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Polk veteran reflects on World War II invasion

World War II veteran Howard Greene of Polk County holds pictures of Omaha Beach where he landed on D-Day. He ended up just outside of Berlin at the end of the war.

MIKE DIRKS/TIMES-NEWS

By Mark SchulmanTimes-News Staff Writer

Published: Saturday, June 6, 2009 at 4:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, June 5, 2009 at 11:07 p.m.

TRYON — “Every minute we were killing Nazis, day and night,” said Howard Green, a World War II veteran. “There was no such thing as sleep.”

That sums up Tryon native Howard Greene’s experience that began 65 years ago on D-Day when his special ops battalion stormed up the 200-foot cliffs at Omaha Beach in France during the World War II invasion.

Greene, now 90, reflected on that time of his life when he was a 22-year-old staff sergeant in the Army.

“They sent us to the hot spots,” Greene said. “To all the real bad places.”

Greene spent 28 years in the Army and retired a chief warrant officer.

Hundreds of North Carolinians were among the approximately 160,000 Allied troops at the Omaha and Utah Beach landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, according to the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. The tidal wave of American, British and Canadian troops marked the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Army in occupied France, and hastened the fall of the Third Reich.

Under the command of American Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, five landings on five beachheads resulted in nearly 10,000 Allied casualties and 2,500 American deaths. That landing is graphically illustrated in the opening of the movie Saving Private Ryan.

Greene said that scene was depicted very accurately.

But Omaha Beach was only the beginning and D-Day was just another day for Greene and his men.

“I must have walked from Omaha Beach to the Elbe River,” said Greene, who experienced 154 straight days of combat in World War II.

D-Day

Waves crashed against the landing vessel that transported troops to the shores of Omaha Beach. Greene couldn’t see over the walls of the small boat, but could hear the bombardment of artillery bursting in the waters around the landing craft.

The seas were rough that morning and it took an hour for the helmsman to find a somewhat calm spot to drop off the troops. The front of the vessel’s ramp dropped and Greene jumped off into the waters to reach the shore. Germans were atop the massive concrete cliffs firing at the Allied troops below.

“We were scared to death,” Greene said. “We were doing the best we could and doing what we were told.”

Their duty was to scale the sheer cliffs of Point du Hoc under enemy fire. Once there, they were to destroy German guns and capture their fortifications.

They eventually were successful, but many men perished in the attempt.

After getting out of the boat, Greene could barely keep his head above water in the volatile ocean. “I thought I was going to drown,” he said. “And some did.”

Greene waded onto the beach and there was only a few feet of sand as he faced the rocky cliff leading up to the enemy. Gripping onto what he could, Greene attempted to climb the cliff but fell back to the ground after only 15 feet,

“We had to shed our packs,” Greene said.

The men left their gear behind with only weapons and ammunition in hand. It took from six to eight hours to fight their way up to the summit using ladders and ropes along the jagged rocks. Out of the 48 men, only 12 reached the top.

“It was hard,” Greene said. “I would be talking to someone and he would just fall over dead. Stuff like that really got to me. And of course the Germans were waiting for us.”

A small arms battle ensued at the top of the hill and Greene’s battalion had to take over a German fortified structure otherwise known as a pillbox. There were 13 Germans inside the pillbox. They overtook the enemy but soon found they had to move on to their next mission.

“It was an awful time in my life,” Greene said of D-Day. “Just awful. It’s unbelievable. I don’t know if anyone can explain how bad it is to be in a war.”

The battlefields of Europe

The small battalion was exhausted, but that was only the beginning as they traversed across the war-torn battlefields of Europe, meeting up with various infantry divisions.

Two days after D-Day, they arrived at the battle in Brest, France, where they spent three weeks fighting off the enemy.

“It was up to us to either kill them or capture them,” Greene said.

From there, they moved from hedgerow to hedgerow killing German soldiers all the way through Luxembourg and France and across the border into Aachen, Germany. The Germans were determined to hold that city, Greene said, “But we rooted them out,” he said.

They moved along through the plains of Cologne, taking out small towns along the way and passing through several abandoned dairy farms.

“It was the most pitiful sight,” Green said.

The milk bags of all the unattended dairy cattle were busted.

Watch on the Rhine

Not all of Greene’s memories were horror stories.

It was nearly September when Greene and his men were ordered to stake out the Rhine River in Cologne, Germany. he found a freight yard where they could take cover and keep a lookout along the river for German soldiers.

“If they wanted to fight, we’d let them have it,” Greene said.

One night, he was on watch and saw a small boat drifting slowly to the banks near their post. In the distance he could see the Cologne Cathedral.

“At night it was like daytime with all of the shells going off,” Greene said.

The boat came to a rest at the shoreline and two figures raised up from the boat. They were two nude German women who Greene said were probably going to swim across the river.

He wrapped jackets around the women and brought them to his commanding officer’s headquarters, which was a half-destroyed house. The girls gave the soldiers much-needed information on the enemy.

“That was my experience of my watch on the Rhine,” Greene laughed. “Capturing two German girls.”

At times, Greene could see enemy troops on the other side of the river but they were too far away to shoot at each other.

“So we would wave to them and they would wave back,” Greene said.

The Battle of Hurtgen Forest

Greene was at the longest single battle in U.S. Army history — the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

Greene said the trees were set up in rows like an orchard. The beautiful forest was the place of one of the fiercest battles fought in Germany as the Allies fought a trench war against the enemy.

“They were really set up with underground bunkers,” Greene said.

The U.S. Army lost about 33,000 troops over the five-month battle.

“There were so many bodies up that hill you couldn’t even walk,” he said.

They had to reach a German pillbox halfway up the hill. Greene remembers two brothers in his battalion who were always together. A shell landed near one brother, killing him and blowing him 10 feet into his brother, also killing him.

The pillbox they took over that day was one of many to come.

The Ardennes Forest

The next mission for Greene and his men was to take three German pillboxes in the Ardennes Forest. They approached one pillbox in the evening and could hear the soldiers drinking and carrying on with music and women inside.

Under the cover of darkness, Greene snuck behind a German soldier on watch and strangled him to death without a sound.

“You had to be fast and I was fast back then,” Greene said.

Then the soldier pulled the pins of two white-phosphorous grenades and threw them inside the pillbox. “We didn’t hear music after that,” Greene said.

They did the same technique with the next two pillboxes.

The men had been fighting for months and they were exhausted. While in Ardennes, they were ordered to their next destination, one that would later be called the Battle of the Bulge.

Battle of the Bulge

They were behind enemy lines and donned German helmets to conceal their identity.

“I had some brave men,” Greene said.

He and a few other elite troops were informed there was a one-star general in enemy territory that needed to be rescued. They went through the lines as if they were Germans to retrieve the officer. The Allied soldiers, wearing the enemy’s helmets, escorted the general out.

Greene didn’t get a medal for rescuing the general or for many other heroic acts throughout the war.

“I saw men in my outfit that would qualify for the Medal of Honor two to three times a day,” Greene said. “That was the kind of war we were in.”

Greene did receive two Purple Hearts. “I’ve been nicked so many times I could’ve gotten 20 Purple Hearts,” he said. “You would just let the medic bandage it and move on.”

The battering ram

At one point in Greene’s adventures, he found himself behind enemy lines in a train yard. One locomotive was running but no one was in it.

“It was a pretty sound,” Greene said. “It reminded me of home.”

There was a hidden bunker full of enemy troops along the tracks. One of Greene’s men was able to get the locomotive running strong. The tracks curved right at the entrance of the bunker. If the train was to derail at that point it would go straight into the entrance.

“We cranked it up and pulled it wide open,” Greene recalled.

Their plan worked. “Buddy, that thing went through there like a streak of lightning,” Greene laughed.

Trains were not the only mode of transportation they used to disrupt the enemy.

Dinner time

Greene and his team of soldiers were to scout out a small enemy airfield and report back to headquarters. There was a plane on the airstrip with its engine running, unmanned and armed with a bomb under the fuselage and nearby was a mess hall full of German soldiers.

It was a recipe for disaster as the day turned to night. One of Greene’s men was a pilot in the United States. The plane faced the mess hall and the soldier said he could get the throttle running and run the plane straight into the building after jumping out.

“This fella that was with me was the bravest man I’ve ever seen,” Greene said.

The plane rolled across the runway heading dead into the mess hall.

“That plane squarely hit that building and blew it up,” he said.

New kid on the block

As the war neared its end, Greene met a special child. An Italian boy was left without a family and Greene’s battalion adopted him as one of their own. The child would stick with the group on patrols and he even threw a grenade in a German bunker because they would not shoot at what they thought was a defenseless child.

As they returned home from the war, one of Greene’s men smuggled the child back to the States and adopted him as his own.

As D-Day is celebrated, Greene holds many more heroic tales of his journey through Europe. The Tryon resident fought in many more battles, was part of the several liberations of concentration camps, guarded Eisenhower and was in the first group to meet the Soviets at the Elbe River at the close of the war.

Greene on Iraq

From his experience, Greene said what is needed to win the war in Iraq is more troops. Despite the technological advances and improvements, what really matters are having troops on the ground.

“They don’t have enough ground troops over there to guard a one-star general going to an outhouse,” Greene said.

“You can’t ride around in a Humvee and a helicopter and win a war,” he added. “I’ve said that ever since that war started over there. We took Germany in 11 months and it has taken six years so far in Iraq.”

Greene earned 22 medals including the two Purple Hearts, the Combat Infantry Badge and four battle stars.

He lives with his wife of 65 years, Mary.

Schulman can be reached at 694-7890 or mark.schulman@blueridgenow.com

In the original article profiling World War II veteran Howard Greene printed on June 6, 2009 in the Times-News it stated Greene was a U.S. Army Ranger in World War II. Although not a Ranger, Greene served with the 28th Infantry Regiment, 8th Infantry Division from 1941-1945, according to the Library of Congress.

<p>TRYON  Every minute we were killing Nazis, day and night, said Howard Green, a World War II veteran. There was no such thing as sleep.</p><p>That sums up Tryon native Howard Greene’s experience that began 65 years ago on D-Day when his special ops battalion stormed up the 200-foot cliffs at Omaha Beach in France during the World War II invasion. </p><p>Greene, now 90, reflected on that time of his life when he was a 22-year-old staff sergeant in the Army.</p><p>They sent us to the hot spots, Greene said. To all the real bad places.</p><p>Greene spent 28 years in the Army and retired a chief warrant officer.</p><p>Hundreds of North Carolinians were among the approximately 160,000 Allied troops at the Omaha and Utah Beach landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, according to the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. The tidal wave of American, British and Canadian troops marked the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Army in occupied France, and hastened the fall of the Third Reich.</p><p>Under the command of American Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, five landings on five beachheads resulted in nearly 10,000 Allied casualties and 2,500 American deaths. That landing is graphically illustrated in the opening of the movie Saving Private Ryan.</p><p>Greene said that scene was depicted very accurately.</p><p>But Omaha Beach was only the beginning and D-Day was just another day for Greene and his men.</p><p>I must have walked from Omaha Beach to the Elbe River, said Greene, who experienced 154 straight days of combat in World War II. </p><p>D-Day</p><p>Waves crashed against the landing vessel that transported troops to the shores of Omaha Beach. Greene couldn’t see over the walls of the small boat, but could hear the bombardment of artillery bursting in the waters around the landing craft. </p><p>The seas were rough that morning and it took an hour for the helmsman to find a somewhat calm spot to drop off the troops. The front of the vessel’s ramp dropped and Greene jumped off into the waters to reach the shore. Germans were atop the massive concrete cliffs firing at the Allied troops below. </p><p>We were scared to death, Greene said. We were doing the best we could and doing what we were told.</p><p>Their duty was to scale the sheer cliffs of Point du Hoc under enemy fire. Once there, they were to destroy German guns and capture their fortifications. </p><p>They eventually were successful, but many men perished in the attempt.</p><p>After getting out of the boat, Greene could barely keep his head above water in the volatile ocean. I thought I was going to drown, he said. And some did. </p><p>Greene waded onto the beach and there was only a few feet of sand as he faced the rocky cliff leading up to the enemy. Gripping onto what he could, Greene attempted to climb the cliff but fell back to the ground after only 15 feet,</p><p>We had to shed our packs, Greene said. </p><p>The men left their gear behind with only weapons and ammunition in hand. It took from six to eight hours to fight their way up to the summit using ladders and ropes along the jagged rocks. Out of the 48 men, only 12 reached the top. </p><p>It was hard, Greene said. I would be talking to someone and he would just fall over dead. Stuff like that really got to me. And of course the Germans were waiting for us. </p><p>A small arms battle ensued at the top of the hill and Greene’s battalion had to take over a German fortified structure otherwise known as a pillbox. There were 13 Germans inside the pillbox. They overtook the enemy but soon found they had to move on to their next mission.</p><p>It was an awful time in my life, Greene said of D-Day. Just awful. It’s unbelievable. I don’t know if anyone can explain how bad it is to be in a war.</p><p>The battlefields of Europe </p><p>The small battalion was exhausted, but that was only the beginning as they traversed across the war-torn battlefields of Europe, meeting up with various infantry divisions.</p><p>We didn’t have a thing to look forward too except to fight, Greene said.</p><p>Two days after D-Day, they arrived at the battle in Brest, France, where they spent three weeks fighting off the enemy.</p><p>It was up to us to either kill them or capture them, Greene said.</p><p>From there, they moved from hedgerow to hedgerow killing German soldiers all the way through Luxembourg and France and across the border into Aachen, Germany. The Germans were determined to hold that city, Greene said, But we rooted them out, he said.</p><p>They moved along through the plains of Cologne, taking out small towns along the way and passing through several abandoned dairy farms.</p><p>It was the most pitiful sight, Green said. </p><p>The milk bags of all the unattended dairy cattle were busted.</p><p>Watch on the Rhine</p><p>Not all of Greene’s memories were horror stories.</p><p>It was nearly September when Greene and his men were ordered to stake out the Rhine River in Cologne, Germany. he found a freight yard where they could take cover and keep a lookout along the river for German soldiers.</p><p>If they wanted to fight, we’d let them have it, Greene said.</p><p>One night, he was on watch and saw a small boat drifting slowly to the banks near their post. In the distance he could see the Cologne Cathedral.</p><p>At night it was like daytime with all of the shells going off, Greene said.</p><p>The boat came to a rest at the shoreline and two figures raised up from the boat. They were two nude German women who Greene said were probably going to swim across the river.</p><p>He wrapped jackets around the women and brought them to his commanding officer’s headquarters, which was a half-destroyed house. The girls gave the soldiers much-needed information on the enemy.</p><p>That was my experience of my watch on the Rhine, Greene laughed. Capturing two German girls.</p><p>At times, Greene could see enemy troops on the other side of the river but they were too far away to shoot at each other.</p><p>So we would wave to them and they would wave back, Greene said.</p><p>The Battle of Hurtgen Forest</p><p>Greene was at the longest single battle in U.S. Army history  the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.</p><p>Greene said the trees were set up in rows like an orchard. The beautiful forest was the place of one of the fiercest battles fought in Germany as the Allies fought a trench war against the enemy.</p><p>They were really set up with underground bunkers, Greene said.</p><p>The U.S. Army lost about 33,000 troops over the five-month battle. </p><p>There were so many bodies up that hill you couldn’t even walk, he said.</p><p>They had to reach a German pillbox halfway up the hill. Greene remembers two brothers in his battalion who were always together. A shell landed near one brother, killing him and blowing him 10 feet into his brother, also killing him.</p><p>The pillbox they took over that day was one of many to come.</p><p>The Ardennes Forest</p><p>The next mission for Greene and his men was to take three German pillboxes in the Ardennes Forest. They approached one pillbox in the evening and could hear the soldiers drinking and carrying on with music and women inside. </p><p>Under the cover of darkness, Greene snuck behind a German soldier on watch and strangled him to death without a sound. </p><p>You had to be fast and I was fast back then, Greene said.</p><p>Then the soldier pulled the pins of two white-phosphorous grenades and threw them inside the pillbox. We didn’t hear music after that, Greene said.</p><p>They did the same technique with the next two pillboxes.</p><p>The men had been fighting for months and they were exhausted. While in Ardennes, they were ordered to their next destination, one that would later be called the Battle of the Bulge.</p><p>Battle of the Bulge</p><p>They were behind enemy lines and donned German helmets to conceal their identity.</p><p>I had some brave men, Greene said.</p><p>He and a few other elite troops were informed there was a one-star general in enemy territory that needed to be rescued. They went through the lines as if they were Germans to retrieve the officer. The Allied soldiers, wearing the enemy’s helmets, escorted the general out. </p><p>Greene didn’t get a medal for rescuing the general or for many other heroic acts throughout the war.</p><p>I saw men in my outfit that would qualify for the Medal of Honor two to three times a day, Greene said. That was the kind of war we were in.</p><p>Greene did receive two Purple Hearts. I’ve been nicked so many times I could’ve gotten 20 Purple Hearts, he said. You would just let the medic bandage it and move on.</p><p>The battering ram</p><p>At one point in Greene’s adventures, he found himself behind enemy lines in a train yard. One locomotive was running but no one was in it.</p><p>It was a pretty sound, Greene said. It reminded me of home.</p><p>There was a hidden bunker full of enemy troops along the tracks. One of Greene’s men was able to get the locomotive running strong. The tracks curved right at the entrance of the bunker. If the train was to derail at that point it would go straight into the entrance.</p><p>We cranked it up and pulled it wide open, Greene recalled.</p><p>Their plan worked. Buddy, that thing went through there like a streak of lightning, Greene laughed.</p><p>Trains were not the only mode of transportation they used to disrupt the enemy.</p><p>Dinner time</p><p>Greene and his team of soldiers were to scout out a small enemy airfield and report back to headquarters. There was a plane on the airstrip with its engine running, unmanned and armed with a bomb under the fuselage and nearby was a mess hall full of German soldiers. </p><p>It was a recipe for disaster as the day turned to night. One of Greene’s men was a pilot in the United States. The plane faced the mess hall and the soldier said he could get the throttle running and run the plane straight into the building after jumping out.</p><p>This fella that was with me was the bravest man I’ve ever seen, Greene said.</p><p>The plane rolled across the runway heading dead into the mess hall.</p><p>That plane squarely hit that building and blew it up, he said.</p><p>New kid on the block</p><p>As the war neared its end, Greene met a special child. An Italian boy was left without a family and Greene’s battalion adopted him as one of their own. The child would stick with the group on patrols and he even threw a grenade in a German bunker because they would not shoot at what they thought was a defenseless child. </p><p>As they returned home from the war, one of Greene’s men smuggled the child back to the States and adopted him as his own.</p><p>As D-Day is celebrated, Greene holds many more heroic tales of his journey through Europe. The Tryon resident fought in many more battles, was part of the several liberations of concentration camps, guarded Eisenhower and was in the first group to meet the Soviets at the Elbe River at the close of the war.</p><p>Greene on Iraq</p><p>From his experience, Greene said what is needed to win the war in Iraq is more troops. Despite the technological advances and improvements, what really matters are having troops on the ground.</p><p>They don’t have enough ground troops over there to guard a one-star general going to an outhouse, Greene said.</p><p>You can’t ride around in a Humvee and a helicopter and win a war, he added. I’ve said that ever since that war started over there. We took Germany in 11 months and it has taken six years so far in Iraq.</p><p>Greene earned 22 medals including the two Purple Hearts, the Combat Infantry Badge and four battle stars.</p><p>He lives with his wife of 65 years, Mary.</p><p>Schulman can be reached at 694-7890 or mark.schulman@blueridgenow.com</p><i><b>In the original article profiling World War II veteran Howard Greene printed on June 6, 2009 in the Times-News it stated Greene was a U.S. Army Ranger in World War II. Although not a Ranger, Greene served with the 28th Infantry Regiment, 8th Infantry Division from 1941-1945, according to the Library of Congress.</i></b>